Brad Pitt hits a home run

Home run: Brad Pitt, as team manager Billy Beane, hits upon a way to wring the very best results from his players. Source: The Sunday Telegraph

MONEYBALL Sony Pictures 133 minutes (M) Verdict: Behind-the-scenes baseball drama hits a home run

Oakland's general manager, Billy Beane, used a revolutionary number-crunching process known as sabermetrics to find players whose abilities were undervalued by the traditional methods of player scouting.

Budgets and stats: sounds like pretty dry material, even for lovers of baseball, doesn't it? So it's just as well that the gruffly determined Beane is played by the charismatic Brad Pitt, while the young baseball analyst who pioneers the system is played by deft comedian Jonah Hill.

The movie opens in late 2001 when the Oakland "A's" have just lost three of their key players to teams offering higher wages and Beane is at a loss about to how to replace them with the limited funds at his disposal. The league is fundamentally unfair, he argues, when rich teams can buy any player they want.

Then Beane meets and hires analyst Peter Brand (Hill). Brand, a Yale economics graduate with a gift for figures, explains that most star players are vastly overpaid compared to what they contribute. The right combination of lesser-valued players can deliver as many, if not more, victories.And so they start recruiting players whose shortcomings horrify Beane's colleagues on the selection committee: older players; injured players; the pitcher who throws in a funny way, or the batter with a bad reputation for partying hard.

Moneyball will frustrate viewers expecting a conventional winning-against-the-odds sports drama. It's more of a low-key character piece about the nerves of steel required when going against accepted wi! sdom in a high-stakes situation.

The screenplay is by Steve Zaillian (Schinder's List) and Aaron Sorkin (The Social Network), screenwriters adept at conveying a lot of complex information in a palatable way, and like their lead character, who finds watching actual games too nerve-racking, they deliberately avoid emotional highs and lows.

Bennett Miller directs, and as with his film Capote (about author Truman Capote's research and writing of his book In Cold Blood), tells an intelligent story soberly and stylishly.

Pitt's Beane is a bullish, not always likable man. Scenes where he wheels, deals and trades players with other teams a process the helpless sportsmen have no say in underline the character's coldly scientific approach to his job. He's not about to be buddies with men whose careers he has to push around like chess pieces.

Flashbacks to his own career 20 years earlier and tender moments with his 12-year-old daughter (Kerris Dorsey) help humanise him.

Pitt gives one of his best performances, while Hill, as the brilliant but socially awkward Brand, is an ideal comic foil. Philip Seymour Hoffman, who won an Oscar for Capote, provides strong antagonism as the Oakland team manager Art Howe.

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